A "Uniquely Byzantine" Punishment

Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies is a part of SFU: The Canadian university that is Engaging the World

SFU Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies

Presenting Jake Ransohoff, the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies' 22/23 Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow

AQ 6229

<p>The <a href="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies</a> at Simon Fraser University is pleased to present <a href="http://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/about/people/j-ransohoff.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Jake Ransohoff</a>, the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies' 22/23 Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow.</p><p>On Friday, September 16th, at 2:30 PM PDT, join us in person or online for his talk, "A “Uniquely Byzantine” Punishment? Blinding, Disfigurement, and Perceptions of Cultural Difference Across the Medieval Mediterranean" as part of the SNF Centre for Hellenic Studies' Fall Seminar Series.</p><p>The event will be moderated by the Director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies, professor Dimitris Krallis. </p><p>Attendance is free. The event is open to the public and will be recorded.</p><p>This programming is made possible thanks to the generous support of the<a href="https://www.snf.org/en/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer"> Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF)</a>.</p><h2>Abstract</h2><p>Byzantine civilization is famous for its “judicial savagery.” This talk centers on one particularly brutal punishment—blinding—common in Byzantine history and seen by historians as a stable feature of a certain kind of society. Emperors from the eighth century to the fourteenth blinded their political rivals. Such distasteful punishments, historians usually claim, conceal deep currents of cultural meaning. Byzantine belief held that a disfigured or debilitated person was unfit to rule as emperor, while church authorities sanctioned blinding as a merciful alternative to death. In this way—so conventional wisdom maintains—blinding could signal to its Byzantine audience as an act of pious compassion, even while it scandalized Western observers as a cruel and unusual torment.</p><p>This talk challenges the historiographical impulse to treat blinding as a marker of cultural difference: acceptable in Byzantium but heinous to outsiders unfamiliar with Byzantine sensibilities. It does so by focusing on the case of the French crusader and historian Geoffroi de Villehardouin (c. 1150–1215). Villehardouin’s chronicle On the Conquest of Constantinople expresses shock at Byzantine blinding, adducing various instances of this punishment to justify the Fourth Crusade. But closer attention to Villehardouin’s narrative indicates that the stress of his critique falls not on blinding itself, but rather on kinship and its relation to legitimacy. Meanwhile, a comprehensive survey of Byzantine blinding shows that the punishment all but disappears from the empire in the century preceding the Fourth Crusade. A revised history of punitive blinding helps remove Byzantium from its “habitual exceptionalism” (Averil Cameron), while also revealing shared developments that spanned, rather than divided, Byzantine East and Latin West.</p>

<p><em>Image: The blinding of the emperor Isaac II Angelos, from Laurent de Premierfait, Du cas des nobles hommes et femmes, Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève MS Fr. 190/2 (1410).</em></p>

<h2>Speaker bio</h2><p><a href="http://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/about/people/j-ransohoff.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Jake Ransohoff</a> is the Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies, Simon Fraser University. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago, and defended his PhD dissertation in History at Harvard University in June, 2022. His current research focuses on the intersection between power, political legitimacy, and attitudes toward the body in the Byzantine world—especially the disfigured and disabled body. He is editor (with Nathanael Aschenbrenner) of The Invention of Byzantium in Early Modern Europe, published by Dumbarton Oaks Press in 2021, and co-editor of the forthcoming web resource “The Justinianic Pandemic (541–c. 750 CE): The Historical, Archaeological, Geospatial and Genetic Evidence.” </p>

<p><em>Hellenisms Past and Present, Local and Global Postdoctoral Fellow Jake Ransohoff (Twitter: @jcransohoff)</em></p>

<h2><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer"></a>Moderator</h2><p>Born and raised in Athens, where he lived until his college years, <a href="https://www.sfu.ca/hellenic-studies/about/people/d-krallis.html" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Dimitris Krallis</a> studied political theory at the University of Athens and Byzantine History at Oxford and at the University of Michigan, where he obtained his doctorate. He teaches Byzantine history at Simon Fraser University’s Department of Humanities and is the Director of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Centre for Hellenic Studies. He is the writer of two books, including, <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783030045241" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Serving Byzantium's Emperors: The Courtly Life and Career of Michael Attaleiates. New Approaches to Byzantine History and Culture Series</a>, which was recently <a href="https://alexandria-publ.gr/shop/vios-ke-politia-enos-vizantinou-mandarinou/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">translated into Greek</a>. He has also written numerous articles and co-translated the work of a major Byzantine historian, Michael Attaleiates. His research explores the social, political, economic and intellectual history of Byzantium, as well as its modern reception.</p><h2>Registration</h2><p>Guests can register for the event through Eventbrite. Alternatively, they can register by sending an email to hscomm@sfu.ca.</p>

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